| From: | Max Rible <slothman@*********.ORG> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: SHADOWRUN, 3rd EDITION! |
| Date: | Wed, 2 Jul 1997 16:49:32 -0800 |
>So... now you know why I need to know what people think needs to be fixed in
>the Shadowrun magic system, since it will be my main contribution to the new
>edition. If there are any other Shadowrun rules you think are broken, post
>them, and I will compile the information for when the time comes to make some
>decisions on the 3rd ed. rules. Only one caveat: this is a new edition, not a
>new game. The game rules will be cleaned up and clarified, broken rules will
>be fixed, but the game will remain Shadowrun. So, please, no suggestions
>about fixtures of the Shadowrun world, just the rules of the Shadowrun game.
Some stuff that got made into house rules in our campaign at
http://www.amurgsval.org/shadowrun/house_rules.html :
1. Physical Adepts really got creamed in 2nd Ed. We made Increased Reflexes
add its level to Reaction as well as Initiative, and made the cost
1,3,6,10 for levels 1,2,3,4 (instead of 2nd Ed's 1,4,6 or 1st Ed's
1,2,4,8).
2. Initiates add their grade to their Charisma when summoning spirits.
(Otherwise, there isn't a lot of benefit from Initiation other than being
able to summon them in Great Form.)
3. The Aura Reading skill, as presented in Awakenings, isn't any different
from
Intelligence. It'd be nice to see a clarification on that (such as
one success on Aura Reading counting for two on Intelligence).
4. The Critter power "Blindness" seems very all-or-nothing: you have to
stage down (Critter's Essence)S damage with your Willpower to nothing,
or you go blind. This means that only people with a Willpower of 6 have
a chance of not going blind. It might be good to redefine such
all-or-nothing
powers to allow partial success (i.e. you stage it down to Light so you
are only at +2 to vision TN's...)
5. Can elementals do useful things involving their element? We recently had
a situation where we used a team of four earth elementals to dig a tunnel,
presuming that they could manifest using the local earth and carry it off
by walking it out and leaving it, or at least carrying a similar amount.
(For that matter, can earth elementals travel through the earth while
manifest, despite it being an astral barrier when they aren't?)
6. Wards are a very expensive means of achieving astral security. It'd be
neat to see a shadow comment on the kind of budget a company needs to keep
wards up for their site, as a guideline for making folks who are designing
secure sites think about how much a corp is going to spend on security.
Non-magic stuff that you could pass on:
1. What is Computer Theory good for any more?
2. You might be interested in presenting an optional rule for buying skills
at http://www.amurgsval.org/shadowrun/karma.html -- this basically sets
up skill buying with karma points instead of with skill points, where a
block of 6 can be used to buy 6 karma or 51 karma worth of skill,
depending
on how you apply it.
3. It'd be nice to see some more material on the nature of cyberpsychosis and
what cyberware does to a person's humanity. (There's some existing
material
at http://www.amurgsval.org/shadowrun/humanity.html,
http://www.albany.net/~geenius/sanity.html, and
http://www.interware.it/users/paolo/sr2/society/cybpsych.html .)
4. If you can make all those nifty toys fit in a cyberarm or cybereye, what
can you do for something that doesn't have to fit in a person? James
Bond-
style gadgets must be great in 2058...
5. You might want to look into the parameters on Trolls-- they seem awfully
light for their height, or awfully tall for their weight, and the artwork
seldom seems to really show their height in comparison to normal humans.
(Orks seem rather light for their height as well.)
--
%% Max Rible %% slothman@*****.com %% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "So, an Arisian, a Vorlon, and a knnn go into a tavern..." %%
